The life and random thoughts (sometimes meaningful) of Chris Marshall.

Saturday, June 17, 2006

Father's Day came early

My wife allowed me to go out w/ 2 of my good friends tonight and it was just what the doctor ordered. Joe Long, Craig Spinks and myself ate dinner and talked around an outdoor table at an English Pub in Northern Kentucky for about 4 hours and it was a great time. Its so good to have friends that can seamlessly talk about work, music, movies, families, church issues and the larger themes of the Kingdom of God all w/out skipping a beat. I have been going out on these kinds of nights with these guys and others for about the past 6 years every so often and they always leave me appreciating such good guys to hang around with and generally give each other a hard time.

One of our topics was now that we have discovered how to become the people of God organized in small communities, how can we now get this message out to those around us that are living outside of the Kingdom message? I am as burdened today as I have ever been about not letting this be a secret. We don't want to build structures and systems that require unlimited amounts of resources (time/people/money) to maintain and become the tail that wags the dog. But . . . we're also not okay with keeping private such a freedom giving message as Jesus' invitation to the Kingdom is. We want people to know it and experience it and we're not sure we're doing a great job at that. Its a question we want to continue to wrestle with. In some ways, we're doing a lot better than we ever have been, and in other ways we want to do more. It was just really good to talk about it at length w/ a couple bros.

Thanks to my wife for blessing me with a night out w/ the boyz, it scratched me where I itched. It was a Father's Day present come early.